Normal?
by montez
Summary: I just wish I was normal.


Normal?

By Montez

Disclaimer: Standard-still don't own'em

Authors note: my mind set was is a different place when this story came to me

A rather dark fic- be advised self harm included.

Why couldn't I have been normal?

My whole family is normal but me. I've been told for as long as I can remember that what I have is exceptional, what I have is unique. That I am one of a very few people in the world and what I would be able to accomplish……there is just no limit to.

But right now I feel so alone. The tutors I've had since I was young were, to a point, stumped by me. I would absorb everything they taught and want more. How does a child explain that their brain is in a constant state of need for more information. I would, sometimes, change tutors as quickly as every six months. They'd either get frustrated with me, because I knew more than they did, or they would have taught me all that they could in their field and I would still want more. My parents would have to go the next level up, which at a point got harder and harder to do.

I had no friends once word got around about my 'gift'. The parents of the kids my age just didn't know what to think of me and it was just easier to avoid me. Not that I noticed at first, I was too caught up in the special testing and tutoring to miss them.

Then theirs my big brother. For five years his life was typical, for the three years after I was born it was a normal family of four dynamic. However, the day I saw my brothers homework, at the age of three, and knew the answers to all his math problems, his world changed. My mother gave me larger problems and I got them without much thought, never looking back, my world flew forward and his came to a crashing halt.

I had my big brother until I was nine. I started high school with him. Then I even lost him as he turned against me. It was then that I began to notice just how different I was. I tested out of all the math courses and they had to bring in special teachers for me, this was still in addition to my tutors at home. But I longed to be normal. I was a nine years old in a teenagers world. I didn't understand some of the remarks that the other kids made, but could tell by the way the said them that they weren't very nice. I saw how even my big brother, who I idolized, treated me, I was a freak to him. So I withdrew into my numbers to rationalize things, but there was no rationalizing me, I wasn't normal.

He didn't abandon me totally. He'd talk to me when mom and dad told him to, I knew he didn't like me. I had taken his happy, normal life and turned it upside down. I had taken mom and dad, to an extent, from him.

The last several months have been the hardest. My parents have been bombarded with college offers for me and I see my brother struggle with his few options. Not anywhere as grand in their offerings as mine. I have heard him mention to our parents that he has been offered a scholarship for baseball and I am secretly proud of him. I don't dare mention it to him, he wouldn't care what I thought anyway. I know he wanted to go away, but the scholarship he got was for a local school and it didn't pay living expenses so he'd have to stay at home. I know he wanted to get away from me, but even that was taken from him.

So here I am, I can hear my parents, they believe their voices are low enough that I can't hear but they're not. It's a hushed argument, they never had loud ones. About me going to a school back east and mom having to go with me. My father, truly knowing I couldn't go alone at thirteen, didn't like the idea of his wife being across the country. I had heard this argument a lot lately and it hurt me so bad to know I had become the disruption of what would have been a normal family life for them if I had been born normal, or never been born at all.

Normal wasn't something I would ever be. No one understands the way the numbers fight for attention inside my head. That so much is going on in it that I have to 'zone out', as I have heard my brother call it when he thinks I'm not listening. If I didn't, I feel my head would explode and the numbers would be everywhere. I wish I was normal.

But I'm not. I sit here in my room, in the dark and stare at what I have laying on the floor before me. My mind wants to play games with me. Probabilities, estimations, rationalizations of what I am contemplating, but for once I tune them out. It is almost impossible to do that, but for a brief time I manage to do it. I concentrate on my parents voices down the hall. On the look of contempt I see daily on my brothers face when he passes me in the hall. I wish I was normal.

I look at what is before me and know it will not make me normal. However, it will allow my family to be normal again, like it was before me and my numbers. It's late and my brother is in his room, grounded on a Friday night for getting hauled to the principals office again. No one will know until morning, after which they will have more peaceful nights, without the worries of my schooling any more.

I am trying not to cry. I really do love my family, my parents, and especially my big brother, more then he will ever know. I am doing this for them, for him. So he can have his parents back, I've taken them away from him long enough.

I reach for the pill bottle I swiped from the bathroom cabinet. Mom uses them for her bouts of insomnia. I open the lid and pour them out into my shaking hand. I don't look at this as dying, I look at it as setting my family free of the burden of my numbers. I try not to count the 25 pills in my hand, but my mind counts them anyway. I take a deep breath and feel a tear fall. I will miss then, but they will be better off.

I don't hear the creak of the floorboards outside my door as I put all the pills in my mouth and take a large drink. I'm small for my age, so they don't take long to take affect on me. I don't hear the soft knock on my door, but I do notice the light that is coming in as my door is opened.

"Charlie?" I hear my brother call out quietly.

He has the door open now, seeing my tear stained face as I sit on the floor next to my bed.

"Charlie?" I hear the worry in his voice, thou I don't understand it. I would have thought it would have been relief as his life could be normal again. I saw him step closer, but his outline was fuzzy.

"CHARLIE…WHAT?…….OH GOD!!!!" I hear panic and fear in his voice as my vision gets more fuzzy, "MOM…..DAD…..CALL 911!!!!" He was yelling now, why was he yelling. I felt myself being lifted from the floor, "God Charlie…Why???" He sounded scared.

"DONNIE…..WHAT?" Was that mom? My hearing was starting to fade now. "ALAN!!!" Why was mom screaming?

My last conscious thoughts were that some how I felt safe, funny way to feel when your dying. I knew I was in my brother's arms. He was holding me tight as I heard him crying my name.

"Love you" I mumbled out as everything left me.

Author note: any good? told ya it was dark. am possibly working on sequel, should I?


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